ABC Update

I’ve been slowly poking away at the ABC module without reporting on it here, as the changes have been pretty straightforward. All of the goals at the end of my First Sheet Music post have now been achieved. Here’s the latest version of “The Star of Rakudo” PDF. If you compare it to the output of my old sheet music generator, you’ll see every musical element except the time signature is now correctly rendered by the combination of the Perl 6 ABC code and Lilypond. (In addition, I’ve also added support for rests and triplets, which are now found in the module’s version of the Star of Rakudo ABC file as an example.)

Where to go from here?

1) I guess I ought to fix the time signature thing. That should be trivial.

2) Support for ABC files whose base note duration is something other than an eighth note. (Right now we’ve just hardcoded things to assume eighth notes are the base unit of time.)

3) Broken rhythms.

4) In-line time signature and key signature changes.

5) Handling more than one ABC tune at a time in the input.

I don’t see any major challenges here, other than finding the time to work on this project!

Update: Later in the same day, I’ve already got #1 and #5 working, but I just realized I left out one important (and possibly tricky) one: